The term Salesforce sandbox refers to a development or testing environment within Salesforce.com. A sandbox is created as a copy of the current production organization and is provisioned with all of the configuration, code, and setup data (i.e., metadata) from that organization. Record data may be included, depending on the type of Salesforce Sandbox. Sandbox is initially a replica of production, it is not automatically synced with production in any way. The changes in production will not automatically be reflected in Salesforce sandbox.
What is Salesforce Sandbox?
Salesforce Sandbox is a snapshot of your production environment on the date you create or refresh it. A Sandbox instance is created in a separate environment for a variety of purposes such as development, testing, and training, without affecting the data and configurations in your Salesforce production instance.
Salesforce Sandbox is not considered as a backup of production data and configuration at a point of time, but this is wrong because you usually will use Sandbox for other purposes such as coding, testing, quality assurance, and staging. Sandboxes should not be considered as data backups for the following reasons:
- Full Sandbox refresh is limited to once every 29 days.
- The full Sandbox is only included in the Unlimited and Performance editions. For all others, it has to be purchased as an add-on to your subscription.
The Sandbox should be nearly identical to your production data and configuration. You need to refresh the Sandbox to apply the latest production configuration, data changes, and all existing configurations. Data in the Sandbox that hasn’t been deployed in the production environment will be overwritten.
We can manage multiple Sandboxes depending on our licenses or additional Sandbox purchases. Each Salesforce Sandbox instance is isolated from other instances. So operations performed in one Sandbox will not affect other Sandboxes or your production environment. We can deploy Change Sets from one Sandbox to another Sandbox within the same Production org, also Change Sets are deployed from and to Production with the Sandbox.